Mperience

Mperience s.r.l.

http://www.mperience.com/images/logotop.png
Type	Private
Founded	December 2009
Headquarters	Rome, Italy
Key people	Paolo Baronci - Co-founder, CEO Francesco Carusi - Co-founder, CTO Guido Gigante - Co-founder, Chief Scientific Officer
Slogan	Contagious Ideas
Website	http://www.mperience.com
Type of site	Internet Forum, Recommender System
Available in	English

Mperience is a social media platform about cinema, literature and art (painting, sculpture, photography, and architecture). It was launched in April 2010 and is currently in public alpha.

Description

Mperience provides to the public a database of about 54000 movies, 28000 books and 18000 artists on which is built a semantic recommender system ^[1]. Each movie, book and artist is accessible via a web page, presenting basic information and recommendations for related videos and related items. Users can browse these pages through themes and emotions (e.g., “myths and philosophy” or “journey of rediscovery”) that connect different items. The site allows users to share opinions about cinema, literature and art by mingling text with videos and images. The resulting pages are named Memes on the site, supposedly with reference to Richard Dawkins’ concept of meme.

Technology

Mperience recommender system is based on both natural language processing and machine learning algorithms. Algorithms include variations of restricted Boltzmann machine, singular value decomposition, k-nearest neighbors, and Bayesian networks. Semantic algorithms allow the extraction of relevant passages (“themes & emotions”) ^[2] from the descriptions of items and the computation of similarity between these texts.

Mperience credits Wikipedia and Freebase as its primary sources of ontological information about movies, books, and artists.

History

Mperience was founded in December 2009 and raised $230.000 in seed funding from private investors. In January 2010, the company was one of the finalists at the Start-up Initiative, the start-up competition organized by Intesa-San Paolo banking group ^[3], and in March 2010 was invited at SMAU computer expo for the exhibition "Percorsi dell'Innovazione" (Innovation Paths) ^[4].

References

1. ^ Wired Italy, July 2010
2. ^ "Terminology extraction from unstructured texts, collaboration with the Department of Informatics at La Sapienza University". http://w3.uniroma1.it/dipinfo/dbinfo/verbali/cdd290110.pdf. Retrieved 2010-06-24. 
3. ^ Il Mondo, 12 February 2010
4. ^ "MPerience at SMAU, Percorsi dell'Innovazione". http://roma.smau.it/article/articleview/1942/. Retrieved 2010-06-25. 

External links

• Mperience Official Website
• Freebase